It’s Five After

Five after thirteen, you might say—in annual time. Actually it will be five after in about a minute or so of clock time. The first month of the year is already over. In a swoosh and in a whirl. As we age, time speeds up, and a month is like five minutes, which is also arithmetically accurate. One twelfth is equal to five sixtieth, 8.333… percent.  Precision then breaks down a little. If a month is five annual minutes, one minute should be a week. Indeed this month had three full weeks but two others were but partial, the first beginning on a Tuesday, the last ending on a Thursday. The analogy disappears below that. The minute only has seven seconds; but those seconds at least have names: Monday, Tuesday, etc. Anyway—good enough for noodling on a pad…

What is 1/3 of 2012

The answer is, Today. Our natural tracking of the year is by the seasons, more or less—and if not season then by months, but we don’t get very mathematical about it. But if for some reason you’re so inclined, April 30, with its 121 days (in a leap year), exactly marks the fact that one third of the year is over.

Odd phenomenon, time, when measured in this way or by the clock. What makes me aware of the length of time is waiting for the microwave to finish heating my lunch soup, for instance. The seconds roll off one by one, and I become aware of just how long, really, 32 or 19 or 12 seconds can be when that least pleasant of passive activities, waiting, has me in its grip. But in my natural mode of being, in which time has no real meaning, not in its nacked, ticking sense, sometimes, reading the end of a chapter in a book, I sigh and look at my watch—and behold, I can’t believe it, an hour has just passed in what seems like a flash—because I wasn’t really here. I was outside of time.

The illustration dates back to our exchange-student-hosting days; back then Anne from Denmark was one of our exchange-daughters. She gave us a fine porcelain oval to be hung from the wall. It hangs in that bathroom of ours with its new vanity. I see it every day. It acts as a corrective against vanities:

The late Piet Hein, by the way, was an accomplished scientist, mathematician, inventor, and poet with the gift of profundity and a light touch. Here is another of his nice short poems:

Atomyrades

Nature, it seems, is the popular name

for milliards and milliards and milliards

of particles playing their infinite game

of billiards and billiards and billiards. 

Fashions in Time

Last Sunday we entered a kind of Twilight Zone—and our visceral memories knew it. So did the batteries in the simple clock that hangs in our kitchen. In the morning Brigitte wondered: Had Daylight Savings Time ended? Had I failed to reset clocks? And the kitchen clock stopped in protest. Turns out that right up to 2006, DST in the United States ended on the last Sunday in October. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005 had moved the start of DST up in time to the second Sunday in March—and lengthened its duration to first Sunday in November. All this in the name of saving energy. We will do anything, in other words, except something genuinely effective, to save energy. A graphic to make things clear:

We used to call this “summer time,” and once upon a time it had some relationship to the movement of the sun—although nowhere uniformly. European Summer Time extends from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. But fall ends in September. Still, that is closer. With the change that set in for us here in 2007, summer time pretty much lost its meaning—summer very much over when somber November starts enduring after the pumpkins have been carved.

Ever since Germany introduced DST (as Sommerzeit) in 1916, it has had progressive proponents and traditionalist opponents. Something about “summer time” does indeed remind me of the renaming of months after the French Revolution. Fashions in time are fashions in culture. It strikes me as significant that the trend now is to abandon DST. Most of the globe’s population no longer lives under the DST dispensation. A quite large country left DST behind: Russia under Medvedev—why, just this year! The map I present from Wikipedia (link) shows how things now stand.

As for us, I replaced the batteries in the kitchen clock. And we anticipate “falling back” in the Fall, thus on Sunday morning, November 5.

Newfoundland Time Zone

This time of years, resetting clocks, I’m sometimes reminded of the fact that Newfoundland, in Canada, has a time zone named after itself. It’s 8:30 am here in Detroit as I write and 10:00 am in Newfoundland. That zone also covers the eastern parts of Labrador, which is to the north. If you live in St. John’s, NL, and are talking to someone in New York, you can’t just tell them: “I’ll call you back at ten-thirty my time”—without a little more explanation.

The first time I heard of this, it startled me. Time zones ought to be, I thought, separated from each other by a distance that divides evenly by hours. Here we start getting decimals. Time zone assignment are also quite arbitrary here and there. In Canada Saskatchewan is in the Central Time zone, but the Northern Territories directly to the north of that province operate on Mountain Time.

Time zone anomalies (as these are called) occur in the United States as well. A really fun post on a blog called Twelve Mile Circle here discusses time zones within the Navajo reservation. Arizona on its borders and the Hopis whom the Navajos surround—except for one enclave that the Hopis surround (!)—have different approaches to daylight savings time. Arizona and the Hopis do not observe it; the Navajos do. The same post also has a map showing how Mountain and Pacific times zones are bounded along Idaho’s border. Strangely, is the word.

Daylight savings time was officially introduced on April 30, 1916 by Germany; Germany’s allies in World War I observed it. It was called Sommerzeit (summer time). The ancients also observed it but in another way. The Romans divided the day into halves, each of 12 hours, 12 daylight, twelve dark. Roman water clocks had different scales for summer and for winter time. If you read the summer scale, daylight hours had 75 minutes; on the winter scale they had 44 minutes. Smart, in a way. But, of course, no wristwatches then. (My source here is Wikipedia).

What all of this proves for me is that humanity reigns supreme even over time. Time’s made for us, not we for time. And different strokes for different folks. Europeans don’t begin saving their daylight this early in the year (wastrels!), but virtuous we do.

Profane and Sacred

The year is done, but it is not the new dawn of a sacred time.
It’s once again the ending of an ordinary year profane.
We’ll zero out the GDP and pray meanwhile the rate, the prime
Shall crawl so low the Dow will soar, and if the jobs they see a gain
That’s still all right if they remain in the private sector in the main.

Meanwhile there’s this weirdling feel in this basement where keys click
And bright neons light summer plants, that despite the great precision
Of calendars, where Greenwich Mean’s the universal measuring stick,
Something sacred still adheres, by orbital or high’r provision,
Not just to the ends of years but also to each cell’s division.